THE FIRST SPILL

The wine is Spanish, a 2017 red Rioja with a 16º C temperature service recommendation that I didn’t follow. Like most Spanish wines it must be good, but I will never know. I left the bottle open all night after passing out of exhaustion yesterday, just a few minutes after uncorking it. It now has a vinegary taste that takes over the fruity and woody flavours. The taste is tacky, but I can’t stop drinking it while I write this first spill.

2020 changed our reality. We now live in a mix of the Apocalypse, a low-budget horror American movie with a rare virus plot and a touch of Black Mirror. During the past six months, digitalisation passed from being a trend, to a way of survival. If you are not digital enough you can’t work, you can’t connect with others, basically …you can’t exist. Zoom, Google Hangout, WhatsApp, FaceTime, Instagram, Tik Tok, Weibo, Line and Facebook are the new black: basic essentials for the new normal.  It‘s not surprising that the social media algorithms are able to influence many of our attitudes. Even my mother, who insists that an Arab entrepreneur based in LA took over her Facebook account seven years ago, opened two Instagram accounts when she discovered she could spy on me and my siblings through this means. My neighbour Josephine, who is a diagnosed insomniac due to a birth accident, became obsessed with Tik Tok at night. Josephine was initially surprised when she was apparently classified as gender fluid by the App’s algorithm which served her with interesting content. Now, she seems to enjoy it and she is exploring her new doubled chances on dating Apps. Furthermore, since Tik Tok predicted that within 24 hours she was going to see a peacock and it happened (she saw it on TV), Josephine is convinced that the digital espionage has reached an astrological level.

I have spent most of the quarantine months alone in Continental Europe. It has been far from being easy, but I learnt a lot about myself and life in general. For instance, I discovered my toiletries obsession as I arrived in the old world with eight toothpastes, eleven deodorants, twelve bar soaps and more eye creams than what a tarsier would use in one year - all new items bought during the last three months. I also learnt about patience: I speak five languages, but I realised that patience is the real international language. Like a New Yorker visiting a German village on a Sunday, my patience has been challenged over and over again since I came back to Europe: I have waited four hours for the “emergency team” of the electricity company team after being totally dark for all that time, I have been asked if I am really “me” or if I am actually the “same person” as Mohamed, a guy that for some reason was holding the same ticket number as me for a government registration. To conclude this initial list, I stuffed myself with a variety of bread with chocolate that I marinated in my stomach with all kinds of wine.

It was really hard to understand how I felt regarding the whole COVID-19 situation until my friend Olivia told me that it was essential to leave all important information in writing in case we die, I then realised that we are in a war mode. This warlike sentiment, which I felt for the first time watching Roberto Benigni’s “La Vitta è Bella”, combined with the simultaneous radical leaderships in many countries, has pushed every human’s sensitives to the limit, and has generated continuous and massive social shocks. Leaders across the world are trying to govern communities that seem to be evenly divided in two, with each side thinking that they have the utmost truth. It feels like you need to choose one of the two teams and there are no grey tones anymore. What if I don’t want to choose? Then, who am I? There are no real debates with the objective of finding a complex, but fair middle ground (except for the time in which we all agreed that the fly sitting on Mike Pence’s hair was officially an iconic moment on American TV). We live in a black or white world with a rational advancement that would hardly impress Thales of Miletus if we consider the 2,600 years of human development that separate us from the founder of Philosophy.

Nevertheless, here we are. Imperfect children of God (of the Universe for the agnostics) still trying to solve the mystery of our existence while dancing in front of our phones. This is exactly what inspires this digital writing exercise, the search for the reason of my own existence has taken me to live in seven countries and encounter a good amount of captivating individuals. I do not pretend to give advice or reach absolute conclusions here, but rather share intriguing experiences interpreted through my eyes with a bit of spice. Call it self-therapy, or your anonymous pen pal. Whatever this is, let’s spill it every Sunday…

Be brave.

Myster Spills